In Governor Tarullo’s closely watched speech on bank regulation (I already blogged on the idea of a sliding scale of regulation based on bank size), he also argued for ending the IRB approach to capital requirements. How does IRB translate into Plain(er) English: DIY capital requirements for big banks. Tarullo’s argument is based in part on obsolescence: all the increases to capital in Dodd-Frank and Basel III dwarfed the IRB component. But it is also based on the fact that DIY capital requirements was a spectacularly bad idea (something I wrote about back when). Big banks have built in incentives (courtesy of government guarantees, explicit and implicit) to lower their capital and increase their leverage. Tarullo’s coming to bury not praise this part of Basel II calls for revisiting some of Joe Norton’sprescient work critiquing that accord as a political economy product of lobbying by behemoth banks. If we take New Governance and its experimentalism seriously, it is vital that we look at experiments that failed.

In Governor Tarullo’s closely watched speech on bank regulation (I already blogged on the idea of a sliding scale of regulation based on bank size), he also argued for ending the IRB approach to capital requirements. How does IRB translate into Plain(er) English: DIY capital requirements for big banks. Tarullo’s argument is based in part on obsolescence: all the increases to capital in Dodd-Frank and Basel III dwarfed the IRB component. But it is also based on the fact that DIY capital requirements was a spectacularly bad idea (something I wrote about back when). Big banks have built in incentives (courtesy of government guarantees, explicit and implicit) to lower their capital and increase their leverage. Tarullo’s coming to bury not praise this part of Basel II calls for revisiting some of Joe Norton’sprescient work critiquing that accord as a political economy product of lobbying by behemoth banks. If we take New Governance and its experimentalism seriously, it is vital that we look at experiments that failed.